[quote="YYC Fire Alarms" post_id=85662 time=1576712165 user_id=4467]
Since the NFS-3030 covers the whole complex, not just the school, tripping the system for required fire drills would cause the whole plaza to evacuate. The Potter is a mock system, used only for drills. It will not activate in a real emergency. It’s pretty easy to tell when there’s a real fire, because the main system does Code 3, but the drill system does march time. The systems are not linked or connected in any way. If the Mircoms go off, then it’s a real emergency. If the Potter horns go off, it’s a drill. Sorry if I’m making absolutely no sense.
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That mock system is very interesting; I’ve never heard of anything like it. I also attended a small school that was located in a commercial/office plaza, but our procedure for fire drills was far more rudimentary: it consisted of the principal and vice-principal going around the school while blowing a whistle. While attending that school, I only heard the building’s fire alarm system (a Mircom FA-1000 with 6" bells in code-3) sounding on the rare occasion of a false alarm (perhaps a total of two or three times in five years).
I am now interested in finding out what other schools take place in buildings like these because I am interested in how they would work.
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I used to go such a school. Here’s how things work:
The school occupies all of the 2nd floor and most of the 1st floors.
There’s an internal stairs near the side entrance. (This is in addition to the building stairwells which are used by office tenants, and as emergency exits from the school. Those stairwells are locked on the 2nd floor. The main lobby has steps that you use to get to the school.)
There’s a playground, a small basketball court, and a grassy area behind the building.
(That stairs you see leads to the basement. For many, many years I tried to sneak down there. I didn’t succeed until last year.)
Students and staff would often go hiking in nearby Prospect Hill Park.
Drop-off & Pick-Up: The 1st floor side entrance (at the bottom of the picture) was used for drop-off and pick-up during normal times. (8:20-8:35 and 2:55-3:10). At all other times the lobby was used - this means if your class was on the 1st floor, you’d go in the front entrance, up the stairs to the 2nd floor, and then back down to the 1st floor.
Lunch: There’s a public cafe on the 1st floor (top right corner of the picture). Students can buy lunch from there.
A benefit of the school being in an office building was having central air conditioning.
My school(northbridge middle) has simplex 2903 light plates with 9833’ in most of them. All the pull stations are new fire lite BG12’s (weird combo).One 9833 in the locker room had a broken horn so there is a simplex 4903 horn on top of the 2903. All of the ones in the gym seem to be missing the fire lens on them, four are in the gym. There is one 9833 horn outside I think but that is it for my middle school but my elementary school had mystery light plate that looks like a 4050-80 but it’s not. There are autocall 350’s on top of the mystery light plate. There are really rare ellenco pullstation and a wheellock AS outside that replaced a old bell that is it for fire alarms at my schoo
But anyways, lately they’ve been renovating the TV studio control area at my college’s Fine Arts building, and so far it looks really nice. They reused the existing System Sensor 2151T smoke detectors, but they also installed a couple of SpectrAlert Advance P2R horn/strobes as well! (one in each room of the control area) I assume they were clearing out old stock, especially because the rest of the building already has SpectrAlert Advance horn/strobes, but they are all just mounted on adapter plates right where the building’s original alarms were (Simplex 4051+4050-80 horn/lights) and are presumably P4Rs. I am also kind of surprised they are still using the 2151T detectors (replacing old Simplex heat detectors) instead of replacing them with addressable ones, as the building has a Notifier NFS2-640 system (currently set up as a conventional system), and when they renovated parts of the Student Center in the past decade they’d put in addressable devices since the existing fire alarm panel there (a Notifier AFP-200) had addressable capabilities.
As part of a project with my school district, I’ve been going around to all of the schools in the district to create new tornado shelter plans (the old ones are not good- people near glass, exterior walls, etc. and had also not been updated since district-wide building upgrades). Anyway, one of the schools had a Siemens MXL with wall and ceiling mounted Wheelock AS’s and standard Siemens single-action pull stations. When the building was redone, the system was replaced with a Simplex 4100U, so I assumed that all of the old system would be torn out. As a side note, it’s odd what they’ve done with the existing 4010 systems in the schools that had them- I know for a fact that my old elementary had one, but they’ve all been replaced with 4100U’s for some reason. Anyway, when I got there, I saw that they had kept up most of the AS’s, and had replaced the pull stations with T-bars. However, some parts of the school had Truealerts (mostly ceiling-mounted, they seem to prefer ceiling-mounted alarms around here now). What was even weirder was that other parts of the school had (wall and ceiling mounted) Wheelock Exceeders, which were not there before the upgrades! I can’t think of why they’d install both Simplex and Wheelock devices, but they did. Additionally, there were RSS strobes scattered around the school, and every single one was mounted sideways… I dunno what the heck was going on there lol
Surprise upgrade at my college’s Student Union! The non-renovated areas had their remaining electromechanical horn/strobes (Standard Electric Time 450 horns with 90s-style Faraday strobes on the old Standard light plates and Faraday U-HN-MCS horn/strobes) replaced with System Sensor L-series horn/strobes! I assume they are P4RLs, so they could be hooked up to the existing wiring, unless they decided to cap two of the wires and go with P2RLs so they could be in full sync with the 2-wire horn/strobes in the renovated areas (P2Rs and P2RLSs, depending on the time the area was renovated). This means there are pretty much no more electromechanical horns left on the campus (especially since the other buildings have since replaced them all with electronic horn/strobes, using SpectrAlert Advances, Space Age VA4s and Wheelock Exceders.) From what I could tell, the panel for the Student Union is still the existing Notifier AFP-200, as the LCD-80 annunciator in one of the entrances is still intact, and the NBG-12LX pull stations in the renovated areas still blink red. Now if only they could go and install remote strobes in the restrooms and Stopper II covers over all the pulls…
I would say to tell someone from the maintenance staff that they do that as a suggestion but in my experience the maintenance staff tend to blow you off. :x
I would say to tell someone from the maintenance staff that they do that as a suggestion but in my experience the maintenance staff tend to blow you off. :x
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Well, after that intentional false fire alarm on Halloween, the facilities department did tell me they put fire alarm pull Stopper covers in their budget, so it should happen eventually. Keep in mind, many of the pulls in the non-renovated areas are mounted on Faraday’s ADA-extension adapters, so they’d also have to use the backboxes STI makes for the Stopper covers and cut an opening on the top of each backbox to fit over the adapter.
My school has a Siemens XLS voice system. Pulls are Siemens HMS-Ds under Stopper covers, and the smokes are Siemens HFP-11s. There are also duct detectors with HFP-11 heads as well. Most of the school has Siemens ZH-MC-R (Wheelock ZNS) horn strobes and Siemens ZR-MC-R (Wheeock ZRS) strobes. The gym, cafeteria, pool, and auditorium have Siemens SET-MC-R (Wheelock E70) speaker strobes. They play the standard Code 3 tone with the female message.
My current place of employment doesn’t have a fire alarm system, though in terms of work/school, I always found one of my middle school system’s the most interesting.
The system consisted of modern Wheelock NS-24MCW horn strobes in the halls with RSS-24MCW remote strobes in each of the classrooms. Nothing crazy, though next to every bell and alarm in the hallways sat non-functioning gray Standard Electric 4-350s; none in the classrooms except for one. I always thought that those horns were part of the previous system presumably installed when the building was built in the 60s, though I heard that 4-350 in that classroom that I mentioned go off once with the bell system, so I’m completely unsure of their purpose. Was extremely quiet too, as if it wasn’t drawing enough current.
My high school also had Simplex 4903-9219s set on continuous with traditional T-bar pulls. Despite the cinderblock hallways, they were much more pleasant on the ears than anything I’d experienced prior.
I did a ‘virtual’ tour of the university that I’m going to in the fall and wasn’t surprised to see that most of the updated dorms have Siemens Cerberus Pyrotronics voice evac systems with rebranded E-50’s… along with sounder bases in the dorm rooms. Unfortunately, it looks like they’re really pushing to have most / all of their old academic buildings redone for the fall semester. When I took a tour last summer, there were some pretty nice Simplex systems from the '70s and '80s, as well as a few newer Notifier systems that had Spectralert Advances, so it’s going to be interesting to see what they decide to do with the renovations. Siemens really seems to be dominating the university market, so I wouldn’t be surprised to see all of the buildings have the same setup as the dorms.
[quote=maxshaw post_id=87028 time=1589481402 user_id=2957]
along with sounder bases in the dorm rooms
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In many cases the sounder bases only activate locally. Do the rooms also have speakers in them?
